We stayed for about another day. Everything went quiet, so we managed to go out from there and she was there in our apartment! She was upstairs and the Germans didn’t come searching, or they had been through it before. She had survived with her baby, and her husband came back from outside the ghetto [after the deportation].
One thing that I remember that I have to tell you is that one day, some Jewish guy picked off a German. They came into the ghetto and they took three young boys and hung them in the middle of the ghetto. They forced everyone to come and watch it. My uncle went, and closed me and my aunts in the room and said, ‘You don’t go.’ He went because everyone had to go. I remember there were hangings like this for maybe a week or two. When I went out into the street, I saw them hanging. This was the first time I saw dead people, and hangings.
Now it was July 1943. We didn’t know what to do, we didn’t have a chance. [But] one day the Judenrat, the Jewish council in charge of the ghetto, had an announcement that people who had foreign papers to immigrate to the United States, England, or South America should register with them because the Gestapo was going to arrange something for them. My aunt and uncle, in 1938 before the war, wanted to immigrate to the United States—we had some relatives there. They got some papers and my aunt said to my uncle, ‘You go to the Judenrat with something like this, and maybe something can be done.’ He had some friends with the Judenrat…I wasn’t registered at all in the papers, so they added my name. The next day, they came and said to my uncle, ‘You know what, they agreed to take you all, and you have to be ready in 24 hours.’ They said that we were going to go to be exchanged for some prisoners of war, but we didn’t know; it was a gamble. You couldn’t take anything, only a few belongings—no jewelry, no pictures, nothing. My aunt hid a few little pictures and some jewelry, not much, and she put it in her clothes, so my uncle wouldn’t know—he wouldn’t have allowed it. We went and my other aunt, my mother’s sister with her little two-year-old boy, said, ‘You don’t have to go. If you want, you can stay with me.’ Luckily I didn’t, because they didn’t survive. This was the last time that I saw them in the ghetto.
The Prison in Kraków
My aunt and my uncle and I went with thirteen other people. We went out from the ghetto and the Gestapo took us on the train during the night and they brought us to Kraków. So they brought us to the jail, and there were quite a few people from other cities, [people] with the same papers to immigrate to the United States and all kinds of foreign countries. They put the women and children in a separate jail cell and the men in another one. But before they put us there, they told us to take off all our clothes, and they put us in a little room, and there was a ceiling that was like showers, but we already knew that the showers meant gassings. So we didn’t know, they closed the doors, and they let us stand like this for five or ten minutes [before the water came on], not knowing... can you imagine the fear?
We were in that prison for ten days.[*] During the night we heard people [screaming]; they were shooting people outside in the courtyard, killing people. On the walls [of the holding cell], there was writing all over the walls, ‘Don’t forget us, we are going to Auschwitz.’ ‘Don't forget us.’ ‘Remember us.’ The whole wall was written in Polish and all kinds of languages, and we were there in this condition, and we didn’t know what was going to happen to us….
After 10 days, they came in the room, and they came with a list with names. It was very frightening and they took us down to the courtyard and they put us against the wall surrounding the jail, and ordered, ‘Turn around with your face to the wall!’ They were going to shoot us in the back. They held us like this for, I don't know, for maybe fifteen minutes, and then they said, ‘Turn around!’ and they marched us to the train station. Why they did that, I don't know, it was only for their enjoyment, for their pleasure.
They took us by regular train, not cattle trains, you know—but we didn’t know where we were going. After three days, we were passing Berlin! And [after more days] they brought us to a new place, the train stopped in the middle of the forest; we didn't see anything. They opened the doors and right away we saw the Germans with big dogs, shouting, screaming, ‘Raus! Raus! Out! Out!’ They took us out of the train, and they marched us into Bergen-Belsen.
July 14, 2013/Belzec Memorial
We arrived in Poland from the Czech Republic a few days back. We met our Polish guide Waclaw, a treasure who will be masterful in his empathetic recounting of what we will witness here, beginning in this beautiful, revitalized city of Kraków. And like the city, the Jewish community here is also trying to revitalize; there is even a Jewish cultural festival coming up soon in Kraków. Our non-Jewish Polish guides have certainly been passionate about not letting the past die, as were our German historians encountered on our trip. Gosia takes us to the Jewish Community Center, and Jakub gives us a guided tour in the new Jewish Heritage Museum. He reaches 12,000 schoolchildren, doing outreach, and works with others to resurrect desecrated Jewish cemeteries—as he reminds us, it is Polish heritage as well as Jewish heritage. In the 15th and 16th centuries, Poland was the center of European Jewish life. In fact, at the end of the 18th century, 75% of the world’s Jews lived in the former Galicia, where we are, once part of Poland, Ukraine, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Still, in most places in Poland there is nothing left of this heritage; out of what was once millions, today only between 12,000 and 14,000 Jews call Poland home. And let’s not forget that after the war, Jewish survivors were not exactly welcomed back by their neighbors with open arms. And the Communist regime conducted its own purges of Jews as well; all the more reason to embrace the work of Gosia and Jakub and other dedicated Poles.
*
The bus ride from Kraków to Belzec (pronounced ‘Bel-zich’) Memorial site is five hours. Imagine what it was like traveling in a packed railcar. Well, we can’t.
I carry a letter with me written by my friend, survivor Ariela, who, like many friends, is supporting me in my travel here. It has been in my pocket for weeks. Ariela was eleven when she was liberated with her aunt on the ‘Train near Magdeburg.’ She had also survived the ghetto, and done time in the infamous Montelupich Prison in Kraków.
A little girl. In a political prison.
So, I am kind of quiet as we approach the memorial site. Ariela’s mother, only 36, both of her grandmothers, her grandfather, and two aunts were murdered here in 1942. Her father, other grandfather, and uncle were murdered in Auschwitz.
The annihilation camp in the small town of Belzec was sited for its good connections to rail lines and, obviously, relatively close proximity to large Jewish populations. Operations began with testings on small groups of Jews in March 1942 and expanded thereafter. Railcars jammed with up to 100 people were uncoupled from larger transports of forty to sixty cars in units of 20 cars at a time for ‘processing.’ The deception included time for the victims to turn in all valuables, as they were told they had arrived at a ‘transit camp.’ In the early days, the men were separated from the women, and according to the SS method, they were eliminated first to forgo any attempt at resistance. Later, when the numbers increased and Jews increasingly became aware of the true ends of the Belzec camp, organized chaos reigned as the victims were forced to undress and beaten down the ‘tube’ pathway that led directly to the gas chambers. Once sealed inside, the engine was started and carbon monoxide was pumped in, the bodies removed by Jewish slaves and buried in mass graves. In October 1942, the order was given to exhume the bodies and incinerate them on mass pyres using railroad rails as makeshift grills. The murderers also employed a bone crushing machine to pulverize the evidence, and plowed over all traces of the camp after its dismantling in the spring of 1943.[23]
Open-air ovens. Rail track. Bone crushing machines. Bone powder.
There was no memorial here at Belzec for nearly 60 years. When Ariela visited in 1993, there was nothing here; it had reverted to forested hillside. The women in our group enter the memorial for a private cer
emony. The seven men walk the perimeter, near the hillside. It’s said that during the actions, some of the locals would gather on the hillside behind us as transports pulled in to discharge the terrified and doomed victims.
They would watch. And after the German attempt to destroy the site and hide the evidence of half a million gassed and cremated, this site, like many others, would be rifled for gold, pockmarked with shovel pits by the local population. Surely those Jews had gold with them when they were killed.
I unfold the letter and step out into the acres of dark molten stones imported here to build the memorial. I am setting up my own memorial. My friend and fellow traveler Alan snaps a photo.
Later, the group boards the bus in silence. I had kept the letter to myself, but now Alan asks, gently, if he may see it. It gets passed around in the back of the bus on our way to the hotel in Lublin. After what we have seen today, I think it makes an important impact on all.
My father asked in his last letter from jail that I should pray for him, and believe me that I do. You asked how I was left with my aunt, it is a long story, one of those that hurts me to this day. But in short, my mother pushed me physically to my aunt, and my aunt pulled me from my mother.
Once home, Alan sends his photograph of me placing the letter on the memorial to Ariela, in Toronto. She is touched and writes back:
I want to thank you with all my heart for what you did for me, by taking my letter and putting it on the ground where my mother’s bones are spread. When I saw the picture, I cried. It is already 71 years but my heart still has feeling for all my family.
I’ve been with Ariela many times, at reunions and during a visit to her daughter’s home in Toronto. We sat at the table, and went through the photo album of her family, surrounded by her two daughters and their spouses, and the grandchildren and a great-grandchild. Her beloved husband, Moshe Rojek, another survivor, passed a few years ago. Ariela is one of my staunchest supporters, and sends me wishes for a long and happy life on a regular basis.
Yes, it was another tough day, but somehow I feel like we are making a difference by coming here. I come with no agenda other than to see what happened, though obviously I too feel a personal stake in it all. Ariela was born the same year as my own mother.
*
Warsaw
A teenage girl began to keep a diary and recorded her impressions of living on the edge of Warsaw, a city of 1.3 million and the capital of Poland. She was just eleven when the war broke out; comfortable and innocent, she and her younger sister lived with their parents, and she had extended relatives all around: cousins, aunts, and uncles. Her recollections reflect how quickly her upper-middle-class world came crashing down, bringing girlhood to an abrupt end.[*]
Aliza Melamed Vitis–Shomron
I was born in 1928 in Warsaw, the capital of Poland. I was one of many Jewish girls from a good family. I did not have to struggle for existence; my parents had taken care of that. It was that stormy period between the two world wars, during which two totalitarian regimes emerged, arousing illusions of happiness, national vitality, and development, on opposite ends of a view of society: the communist Russian Revolution and the fascist Nazi regime in Germany. And at the same time, there was an amazing burgeoning of the Zionist idea of return to the ancient homeland.
The close of the summer holiday in 1939 brought her parents rushing from Warsaw to the country retreat the family typically enjoyed outside the city.
The End of August, 1939
My parents, who continued to work in our family business, only used to come to us in the country for the weekends. Suddenly they appeared with a horse and cart. ‘We must go home to Warsaw immediately, they say that the war is about to break out.’ The harsh, incomprehensible words hit us like a hard blow.
Within a week we were already in the midst of heavy bombing from the air. The Germans invaded Poland. It was a nightmare, lasting three weeks, during which almost all of Poland was overrun, and only the capital resisted heroically. Thousands of fires were burning in the encircled city, but it did not surrender. For three weeks, we lived in a cellar, lying on mattresses, in terrible fear of the Stuka planes[*], diving with earsplitting screeching; and fully aware that when all that was over, the Germans would be inside Warsaw. After those three terrible weeks, during which a large part of the city was destroyed, and there was no water in the taps and no more food, the city surrendered.
I went to see the German victory parade in the city streets. I can still hear the deafening sound of their boots pounding the cobblestones as they marched in unison. A faint echo lingered in the air. The inhabitants of the city stood by in silence. The Nazi occupation, which was to last six years, had begun.
Before World War II, Warsaw was the epicenter of Jewish life and culture in Poland; 350,000 Jews made up its prewar population. This vibrant Jewish community was the largest in both Poland and Europe, and was the second largest in the world, second only to New York City.[24]
Autumn, 1940
It was the golden Polish fall of 1940. As usual, the streets of Warsaw were covered with rusty leaves. The merry chatter of children in the city parks, looking for ripe chestnuts fallen from the trees, had died down. School children began to prepare for their studies after the summer vacation.
But the autumn was different that year, in particular for us Jews. The golden fall was clouded. A strange unease hung in the air, the nights were suffused with dread, and fearful premonitions lurked in the morning, especially in the Jewish neighborhoods. Only one year had passed since that fall when the war broke out, and I felt as though that good life we had before had never actually existed; it appeared to me as a pure sunlit memory of something never to return. That summer I had my twelfth birthday, and I felt very grown up. Everything had changed.
We didn’t celebrate my birthday that year. Mother made it quite clear, in her usual tone of voice when she wanted to lecture me: ‘I hope you are by now old enough to understand certain things and to come down from your Olympian heights.’
Father brought a box of cakes for the occasion. Before the war, sometimes Father used to surprise us by bringing a box of cakes, tied up with a thin string, from Kapulski’s store in Marshalkovska Street. But now Jews were unable to get there—these areas now belonged to a different Warsaw, the Polish Aryan part. And Father did not want to humiliate himself by stepping off the pavement whenever a German soldier passed by.
My birthday marked the day when I had to begin wearing a white band with a blue Star of David on my arm, like all adult Jews. ‘Yes, Mother,’ I said to myself, ‘I understand far more than you imagine.’
I saw the anxiety on my parents’ faces; they worried about making a living. Our family workshop was idle, since most of the women working there were Polish—and Poles were not allowed to work for Jews, and every day we worried about Father. All Jewish men, aged 16 to 60, were forced to work, but none signed up of their own free will. They were kidnapped, beaten, and humiliated. At night, German regular army soldiers and the SS drove around in cars and broke into houses, apparently to commit robberies or just out of hooliganism.
Throughout 1940 we stayed in Warsaw, among its dusty ruins. Jewish children were no longer allowed to go to school. Before the war started, I was able to complete the fifth grade and my sister was about to start the first grade.
As a young teen, Aliza joined a youth organization which would become attached to the underground resistance movement in the Warsaw Ghetto. The ghetto was established that fall of 1940 and sealed off from the rest of the city with a ten-foot-high wall topped with barbed wire. Over 400,000 people would be crowded into an area of only 1.3 square miles.[25]
The Warsaw Ghetto
I want to tell you about the Warsaw Ghetto.
Will I be able to describe it, the largest ghetto in Europe? The overcrowding, the feeling of humiliation, the raging typhoid epidemic, the filthy gray sidewalks, and the houses crammed with masses of refugees from the country towns? Hundreds of thous
ands of people wanting to survive, running around like mice, trapped in a maze?
The Warsaw Ghetto was a ‘Jewish State’ under fascist control—an accumulation of all possible contrasts.
In the beginning, stores sold food smuggled into the ghetto, where one could buy anything—even eggs and milk. And outside lurk the snatchers, girls and boys in rags with feverish eyes, lying in wait for people leaving the store, grabbing their food and at once plunging their teeth into it, right through the wrapping paper. People crowd around, kicking and shouting, but the child does not care as long as there is food, no matter what it is. The coffee houses are full of smartly dressed women, wearing elegant pre-war hats. There are also rich smugglers, the new ghetto aristocracy, and all kinds of people getting rich at others’ expense; in front of the houses on the sidewalks lay human skeletons covered by newspapers.
Winter, 1942
The winter of 1942 was a hard one. Famine increased and so did the deaths in its wake. We stayed in bed for hours, trying in vain to keep warm. The evenings were dark—there was no lighting. The news of German victories in both the east and west and the news of mass deportations of Jews from the smaller towns preyed on our minds. It was dangerous to pass by the gates of the ghetto. Sometimes shots were heard from there; they fired into the crowds.
A Train Near Magdeburg Page 9